SecondHand Dreamers
by MuchFailSauce
Summary: One night, like the other nights before that, Rokudo Mukuro opened his mind and looked through dreams. Mukuro drabble fic, possible but dubious 6996. Mukuro has his own insidious way of making sure his protege makes friends with her fellow guardians.


**Disclaimer: This is not mine. I can't think of any cute ways to say that right now, so that's what you'll have to settle for. XD  
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**Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn.**

**Characters: Rokudo Mukuro, Chrome Dokuro, other guardians, and random ofther characters on the side. (ones that Mukuro has been in contact with.)  
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**Warnings: Contains Italian that may be very wrong (I used google translator) and mentions of people getting shot (but only in nightmares.)  
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**Other: I maintain that Mukuro could seriously screw with people's brains (even more than he already does) by getting into their dreams and digging around in there. That would be wicked and evil, but totally in character. :D Playing around with that idea produce this... thing. Enjoy.  
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One night, like the other nights before that, Rokudo Mukuro opened his mind and looked through dreams.

The mist guardian didn't even have to think about his first stop. It took a bit of effort to press into Sawada's mind, even the top layer, but he touched an image with his fingertips and pulled the dreams into his own mind.

Mukuro sorted through the tenth boss's top layer of dreams, raising his eyebrows briefly at the sight of the sun-guardian's sister in a swimsuit, a brilliantly blue towel wrapped around her waist, her face pink with sun and smiling. It looked like a combination of imagination and memory, wound up together into a dream that Sawada was, apparently, rather enjoying. He left that mind alone, ignoring the irksome feeling of his inability to dig deeper, and sought for another he was connected to.

He touched on another mind almost instantly: Ken. The boy was dreaming-_running on all fours, Chrome and Mukuro-sama side by side and smiling at each other; hunting, tearing throats; face in the mirror is _his_, but no scars, no sharp teeth, just a wide, normal grin_-Animal, human, animal, human. Ken's mind, while sometimes almost bipolar and rather confusing, was nevertheless strangely comforting in its simplicity. Longing, joy, and even knotty emotions like jealousy were straightforward and strong in his dreams. Nearby, Chikusa's mind was still and calm as an underground pool—as ever, dreamless. A very strange boy.

Chrome herself, obviously, didn't dream anymore either. She would half-remember the dreams of others when she awoke the next morning, and that gave her just another touch of power to further her master's goals—a strange connection with her companion's deepest dreams and worst nightmares. Mukuro gave her restless mind a gentle touch to calm it and moved on.

Another stream of thoughts, far, far away in Italy. Lancia was restless, dreaming about his dead family with bittersweet happiness and an almost painful rush of longing. Mukuro didn't feel even a touch of guilt, but shut off that channel anyway. Lancia was constantly aware of his former master's mind now, and attempts to control him were futile. The force required to reforge an unwilling connection would break his erstwhile minion's mind.

A bare second after he managed to extract himself from the remote mind, another explosion of feeling slammed into him from a source much closer to home. Whoever it was, the dream felt like a nightmare of amazing proportions and Mukuro, curious, reached out a non-existent hand and pulled the swirling mass towards him.

_He was standing in a forest, and yet he was inside a building at the same time. The leaves of the trees brushed the lights overhead and muffled crunching echoed around him. _Prey,_ murmured the brain he was riding, and then he was rushing forwards, an animal and a human at the same time, baring his fangs while he spun a pair of familiar weapons—_

Mukuro pulled out with a jolt of uncharacteristically strong surprise, leaving Hibari Kyouya's brain to prowl through its carnivorous dreams. It was rather telling, he felt, that what would be a nightmare in any other normal human brain was an exhilarating hunt in the halls of Namimori to Hibari.

Curiosity sparked his brain, and he cast about the town, more deliberately this time. He found the dreams he was looking for with very little effort, and took the first one he could reach, slipping inside with the ease of someone opening a door with a broken lock.

Bianchi was dreaming about that odious Arcobaleno baby, Reborn. That was… rather disturbing. Mukuro watched about seven and a half seconds of the sickeningly sweet wedding scene that the girl was constructing, then left, jumping from that brain to the one closest to it.

…Ah. Now _this _was a nightmare, and exquisitely painful to the mind he was in, although Mukuro's Italian was a little rusty to appreciate it fully_. _He was_—surrounded by corpses and dark, splattered stains, kneeling by the body of a woman whose long silver hair was stained with blood. ("I was playing for you_," the dreamer's thoughts said, weak and shocked, "_I never got your birthday present") Somewhere in the fog surrounding him a voice gloated, mocking him (__**Sono morti. Sono tutti morti**__) in cold, jeering Italian. The baby thunder guardian and the smiling rain guardian lay crumpled at his left in a spreading pool of blood, their eyes wide and blank. They had died with expressions of horror fixed on their faces, still staring at him and he was panicking now because he knew what had to come next in this dream because this was how it always seemed to go and not stopping it was unthinkable but he was too weak to move; to weak even to lift his arms- _

Even as Mukuro settled quietly behind his host's eyes he heard another gunshot ring out, the bullet whistling past him with a fraction of an inch to spare. _A limp body thudded to the ground in front of him and he looked down into Jyuudaime's blank, dead eyes_—

Mukuro left Gokudera Hayato abruptly as he jolted awake, gasping and shaking, sweat and tears running down his face. _That_ was what devotion to a useless superior got you; strain and nightmares. Foolish boy. In the event that Mukuro was forced out of his comfortable plotting position by a coup, this would probably be the best place to overthrow Sawada from, but hopefully that day would only come when he forced it to himself. In the meantime, it would do him good to find an opportunity to gain entry into the other guardians' minds. For now, this was what he had to work with…

Rokudo Mukuro left the world of dreams and vanished into far away Vindice, leaving knowledge and the faintest traces of dreams on the edge of Chrome's mind.

The next day, Chrome 'accidentally' pushes Sasagawa Kyoko a little towards her boss so that the girl falls against him, and gets a flustered, pink-faced smile in return. The bond of trust grows a little bit more, and far away Rokudo smiles.

A few weeks later, when they have a quiet second alone, she puts a hand on Gokudera's shoulder, ignoring the little twitch that's still there when she touches him. Then she wraps the memories of his boss's face and the pale-haired, smiling woman up in the piano music that haunts his dreams and puts it strong and sure in his mind so that it'll shine there whenever he needs it. When it first appears in his mind his face goes pale, and then pained, and then peaceful, and Chrome is well aware when he opens his eyes to look at her that this is probably the only time she'll see that grateful expression from him. Mukuro's real body laughs in his oxygen mask and makes a mental note to step in next time the boy has a nightmare and make that gift from Chrome seem important.

He doesn't have to. The nightmares stop.

Hibari still confounds Rokudo; even with the insight into his dreams he never really manages to get into the prefect's head outside of his night-time prowling through Namimori high. Nevertheless it is a small point of pride for him that the boy starts, at some point, occasionally remembering Chrome's name. A tiny, but significant triumph.

Chrome doesn't remember where the strange dreams come from the next day, but she knows they're true.

One night, like no other night before it, Chrome Dokuro closed off her mind and dreamed her own dreams.

But that's a story for another day.

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**As ever, the ending is kinda...**

**...WHUT?**

**But I kind of like this story, for no real reason that I could name. I'm almost glad that Yamamoto never came into contact with Mukuro's trident, because I have no idea what he would dream about. Nevertheless, my favorite part of this story has to be Carnivore!Hibari roaming the halls of Dream!Namimori High. That seems like the most in-character part of the story to me, for some reason. Reviews are proof of my existence. 3  
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** -FSA  
**


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